New Year's Greetings from Calgary

I love the handwritten message on this 1906 postcard: "Which one are you?" No doubt, the sender had something else in mind. For me, the postcard is the perfect tagline for the blog series I launched during Stampede Week in 2015.

Seeing Calgary through the eyes of writers reminds me that this is a complicated city with a multitude of stories that capture the particular essence of this place. 

So far, the blog has run 37 posts spanning the city's 140-year history, its geography and the literary genres. The posts have struck a chord with resident Calgarians, far-flung expatriates and literary travellers. 

Thanks to all of you who have joined me on this virtual walk through Calgary's literary landscape, and welcome to those who are just tuning in. I hope you discover the city you recognize, and the one you've never seen before.

Pictures from a literary Jane's Walk

Here are a few photos from Writing the City, the literary Jane's Walk I led in Calgary on May 1, 2015. Thanks to Blair Carbert and Jane's Walk organizer Julie Black for the photographs.

Central Memorial Park: important literary ground. Calgary painter, architect and poet Maxwell Bates (1906-1980) grew up a few blocks from here and spent hours in this park and what we now call the Memorial Park Library. His family friend, the poet P. K. Page (1916-2010) also haunted the stacks at this library as a young girl. 

Calgary writers Joan Dixon, Barb Howard and Aritha van Herk

Central Memorial Park: the crowd listens to the Calgary poems of Maxwell Bates and Lisa L. Moore, a Calgary native now living and teaching in Austin TX. One of Moore's Calgary poems is called "Cold Garden," the Old Norse words for Calgary Bay on Colonel James Macleod's ancestral homeland on the Isle of Mull.

On the 5th Street underpass: John Snow's "Near Bragg Creek." Snow's house in Lower Mt. Royal (915-18th Ave SW) is part of Calgary's literary history. Several U of C writers-in-residence have lived at the Snow House, including Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje and Alberta's own, Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011).

Beside the old Glenbow Museum: Robert Kroetsch's 1983 novel, Alibi has a deep connection to the city. Glenbow founder Eric Harvie was the inspiration for Kroetsch's millionaire oilman collector, Jack Deemer. Both men had the reputation for collecting "anything that was loose."

Barb Howard talks about the origins of her novel, Whipstock: The Story of an Oilfield Pregnancy (2001). The protagonist Nellie Mannville works at an oil company cafeteria inspired by Barb's long-ago job working the steam tables at the Bay Buffeteria. The cafeteria in Whipstock is based on what was then the Amoco building (240 - 4th Avenue SW) where Barb worked as a lawyer in the 80s and 90s.

Across from the facade of the old Eaton's store on Stephen Avenue: Lori Hahnel talks about her novel  Love Minus Zero (2008). Her protagonist, Kate Brandt plays guitar in an all-female punk band in 1980 and works part-time at Eaton's. The Calgary locales in Lori's book are precise and specific, thanks in part to her editor, Mark Jarman, a one-time Calgarian.

Beside the Hudson's Bay arcade: Katherine Govier joins us from Toronto by video to talk about her Calgary novel, Between Men (1987). Govier's story explores the 1889 murder of a young Cree woman that occurred near the intersection of Stephen Avenue and 1st Street West. Photo: Julie Black

One of the Calgary Herald gargoyles on the historic Alberta Hotel building: a medieval feature with a contemporary twist. Figures depict newspaper staff members, including the stenographer and the cleaning lady.

The Palliser Hotel: an evocative setting for writers over the decades, including Edna Alford, Rudy Wiebe, Caroline Russell-King and Aritha van Herk.

Aritha van Herk speaks about her novel, Restlessness (1998), set in the Palliser Hotel. The novel also features its own walking tour. "There are warm spaces," the protagonist tells her companion about Calgary, "if you know how to find them."

The Memorial Park Library: an architectural and cultural jewel in the city's crown. As the walk concludes, we pay homage to literary pioneers, Annie Davidson (founder of the first literary book club in 1906 and campaigner for the city's first library) and Alexander Calhoun (the city's first chief librarian). 

Shelf Life Books: a display of a few of our guest authors' books. The walk wraps up at this lively, hospitable independent bookstore. Check it out the next time you're in the Beltline. 

Thanks for taking a look, and thanks to everyone who came out for the walk. Check out the  list of works I talked about on the walk here, as well as a few suggestions for further reading. This is only a sampling: in the weeks to come, I'll be exploring more Calgary literary landscapes. I'll let you know what I find.

Writing the City: A Jane's Walk Reading List

I was thrilled to lead a Jane's Walk called Writing the City this weekend. We explored a few blocks of downtown Calgary through the eyes of writers. We talked about the way writers have brought Calgary to life on the page, and what their stories tell us about the city.

Here is a list of the works we talked about on the walk:

Maxwell Bates, Far-Away Flags (1964)

Katherine Govier, Between Men (1987)

Lori Hahnel, Love Minus Zero (2008)

Barb Howard, Whipstock (2001)

Robert Kroetsch, Alibi (1983)

Lisa L. Moore, “Cold Garden,” Ostrich Review 6.2 (2015)

Aritha van Herk, Restlessness (1998)

Here are a few more Calgary stories and resources you might like to check out: 

Edna Alford, “Half Past Eight,” Alberta Bound (1986)

Brian Brennan, The Calgary Public Library: Inspiring Life Stories since 1912 (2012)

Sandra Djwa, Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page (2012)

Dymphny Dronyk & Kris Demeanor, The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual (2014)

Caroline Russell-King, The Palliser Suite (2014)

Harry Sanders, Historic Walks of Calgary (2005)

Donald B. Smith, Calgary’s Grand Story: The Making of a Prairie Metropolis from the Viewpoint of Two Heritage Buildings (2005)

Kathleen Snow, Maxwell Bates: Biography of An Artist

Aritha van Herk, “Our Odysseus,” Alberta Views (Dec 2010) 

Aritha van Herk & George Webber, In This Place: Calgary 2004-2011  (2011)

 I am always looking for stories and poems set in Calgary. Please let me know what you find!

Books with Maps

I found this small book – not much bigger than a thick stack of postcards – in Vancouver last month, at a small, quirky shop called The Paper Hound. Helen Humphreys’ The Frozen Thames was on a shelf marked “Books with Maps.”

There is only one map in this beautiful volume: a section of one of the earliest printed maps of London, circa 1574. In it, the river is unfrozen and muddy, the quilt-squares of land, spring green – the same way the landscape looked when my husband and I hiked sections of the Thames Path Walk a year ago last May.

We followed a guide printed from the website before we left. Fumbling with the truncated instructions (I hadn’t accounted for the different paper size in the UK), we relied on small blue path markers and my husband's nose for direction.

I didn’t need a map to follow Humphreys’ story, or rather, stories – forty of them, one for each of the forty times the Thames River has frozen solid. Taken together, they are what Humphreys calls “a long meditation on the nature of ice.”

As I read, I scribbled notes, not about Humphreys’ riveting text, but about an idea that’s been turning in my head for the past several weeks. My story idea has nothing to do with rivers or ice, but as I read Humphreys' prose, the quality of her attention sharpened and suffused my own. I slowed down, considered the narrative choices she made, the material she eased from history, artefact and imagination, the connections she forged. Her techniques offer a  guide of sorts, a way into envisioning my story. Her prose sets my own idea in motion.

In the postscript, Humphreys leaves us with snippets of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando  – a novel that begins on the frozen Thames. “This is a story,” Humphreys writes, “that thaws the imagination, sets it spinning along a swift current of words.”

As is The Frozen Thames. A book chock full of maps after all.